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Hey guys,

First a quick hello since this is my first post to this board. I took up 40k again about a year ago after ~10 year hiatus. So hi!

Anyway, I recently decided to make a modular gaming board so I figured I'd post some pics and see what everyone thinks, or if anyone has a good ideas for additions. I'm making a 4x6 board out of 2x2 tiles. The idea is that I'll have 8-10 tiles to choose from, so whenever my friends and I play we can choose 6 of the 10 and configure them in a variety of ways to get a different board every time we play. Of course, additional terrain (rock spires, buildings, etc...) will go on top of what I'm doing here.

The first attached file is an example of one of the tiles. At the moment, I'm working on three tiles with river bed running through them. I haven't decided whether I'll make it a dry river bed or do water in it, though I'm leaning towards having water in it. My friends and I have tenatively agreed that if there's water in it, for each inch a guy walks through it he has to take a dangerous terrain test.

The second attached file is a pic of the three tiles I'm currently working on all placed together in the frame I built (and all sitting on our guest bed). This was just my test fit to make sure everything is fitting together as planned. You can see that there are some gaps where the tiles meet. That's because I cut the foam poorly. To compensate for that, I'm planning on using the sheetmetal corner protectors you use when putting in drywall. I'll use a mix of drywall mud, glue, and water to mud over the corner protector so you can't see that it's there. That should give me a nice 90 degree corner on all the pieces.

The third pic is just the "marine view" of the river so far.

The fourth pic is the frame I built to hold all of the tiles while we're playing. My plan is just to toss a blanket over the kitchen table or the living room coffee table, set the frame on top, and then set the board tiles into the frame. The frame has a lip on it to hold the tiles in place so if we bump the table it's not a big deal. I made the frame out of 1x3 pieces of oak, stained it black, and the coated it with polyurethane. I thought about just putting a lip on a solid piece of plywood, but decided the frame would keep the weight down a bit. I also realized after the fact that the frame is easier to move around than a solid piece of plywood would have been because I grab the frame anywhere instead of just on the edges.

The fifth pic is just showing the lip on the frame.

From here I plan on adding a hill that spans the corners of 4 tiles, ala the GW game board. After that I'll get the drywall corner pieces put on like I mentioned and then start painting/flocking. I'll post more pics as I make progress.

Let me know what you think!

- Andy

Nice work !! I've toyed with a frame-support system in a game table to create an upper and lower level to the game board (Mordheim City with Sewers below).

Look forward to seeing this project progress.

Brilliant!!! I've toyed with doing a modular board and its good to see other people can be motivated enough. Nice idea.

The OC-D

Looking pretty good, bud. Off to a solid start. It's very wise to make more tiles than you need, so it doesn't get stale too fast. Plus, when there are static features on tables, people tend to develop tactics for them. People tend to start playing the table while playing the opponent. That dangerous terrain test bit seems pretty harsh, but if you all agreed to it, there you go. I hope you make ample crossing points down the road!

You mentioned drywall hills? I would suggest you use another material instead. Especially if you're making static components on the table sections. For starters, drywall will add considerable weight to the sections and, ultimately, the table as a whole. Also, drywall can get very messy over time. If one of those edges where you've made your cuts should break, get dinged, or whatever, if can get pretty messy and really mess up your table. The inherent chalkiness of the drywall could pose a problem. A 4'x8'x half-inch sheet of polystyrene (insulation board. Pink or blue flavors) is cheaper than the drywall sheets unless you're getting 3/16" to 1/4" drywall. That thin, and you'll have pretty wimpy hills. Either way, the foam insulation sheets are only about $8-10 USD per, and you can get a LOT more use out of the sheet. It will be far lighter, too.




Ghidorah

Nice touch! The frame is brilliant.

I 2nd Ghidorah's assertion that drywall is not the best material for hills.... since you are already using pink board, why not make more hills out of the same? In my opinion, the pink/blue board hills look better anyway.

Ghidorah wrote:Looking pretty good, bud. Off to a solid start. It's very wise to make more tiles than you need, so it doesn't get stale too fast. Plus, when there are static features on tables, people tend to develop tactics for them. People tend to start playing the table while playing the opponent. That dangerous terrain test bit seems pretty harsh, but if you all agreed to it, there you go. I hope you make ample crossing points down the road!

You mentioned drywall hills? I would suggest you use another material instead. Especially if you're making static components on the table sections. For starters, drywall will add considerable weight to the sections and, ultimately, the table as a whole. Also, drywall can get very messy over time. If one of those edges where you've made your cuts should break, get dinged, or whatever, if can get pretty messy and really mess up your table. The inherent chalkiness of the drywall could pose a problem. A 4'x8'x half-inch sheet of polystyrene (insulation board. Pink or blue flavors) is cheaper than the drywall sheets unless you're getting 3/16" to 1/4" drywall. That thin, and you'll have pretty wimpy hills. Either way, the foam insulation sheets are only about $8-10 USD per, and you can get a LOT more use out of the sheet. It will be far lighter, too.




Ghidorah

FoxPhoenix135 wrote:Nice touch! The frame is brilliant.

I 2nd Ghidorah's assertion that drywall is not the best material for hills.... since you are already using pink board, why not make more hills out of the same? In my opinion, the pink/blue board hills look better anyway.

No no, I'm not planning on using drywall for anything. I'll build the hills out of pink foam like everything else. What I'm planning on using are the metal corner braces that are used when installing drywall in a house. I'll use those corner braces to create a nice clean edge on the 4 sides of each tile. I'll cover over the metal with a mix of drywall mud, glue, and water.

I'll take some pics when I get to that tomorrow. Thank you Labor Day for making me not have to go to work !

- Andy

Oooohhh... guess I totally got that wrong! That makes much more sense. Very good idea, to use drywall corners for clean edges. I've never thought of that before!

It looks good so far. I like the 2 level effect on the river banks.

I look forward to seeing this as it develops

Well, I haven't posted any updates to this in a while, but I've been working on it for the last few weeks. I made some mistakes the first time around and decided to toss the first attempt in the trash and restart all of the board tiles (the frame is fine). The first set of tiles started out well. I cut and sculpted the river a bit, started on some hills, then I decided to clean up the edges. I tried cutting them at an inward angle thinking I would straighten out the edge with drywall corner braces and drywall mud like I mentioned above. That didn't work so well. In the end, it probably *could* have worked, but it would have been a ton of work. That coupled with my base material warping (see below), made me just decide to start over.

So, some mistakes people can learn from:

1. Don't use lauan (or maybe luaun) as your base, use MDF. Lauan warps, or at least it warped for me, so none of my first tiles stayed flat.
2. Don't use Liquid Nails with foam. The Liquid Nails eats the foam. Use Elmer's glue even if it takes longer to dry.
3. Make sure you cut your tile edges square the first time (i.e. make sure the edge of each tile is 90 degrees to the top/bottom). Trying to square up edges after the fact is a PITA. This is the biggest reason I tossed my first attempt.

With all that said, here are some pics of my second attempt:

- First up are two pictures of the foam tiles sitting in the frame. At this point some sculpting still needs to be done, but it gives you the general idea.
- Next up are two pics of tiles with the base coats on. First I base coated everything with some flat brown I paint I picked up at Home Depot. It's just normal interior flat Behr brown paint. After getting everything brown, I painted the rocks a medium gray. I picked up some cheap black and white acrylic paint at Hobby Lobby and mixed them to get the grays I wanted for this whole project.
- After basecoating everything brown and gray, I used some watered down black acrylic paint, to ink over the rocks. This is pic 5.
- Following the ink, I overbrushed with a dark gray, followed by a heavy drybrush of medium gray, followed by a very light drybrush of light grey on the edges. The finished rocks are pics 6-9.
- Just today I got around to flocking. An example is the last pic.

Tomorrow I'll start by vacuuming up the piles of static grass sitting on the tiles overnight and then I'll start spraying with watered down glue to seal the flocking. After that I'll move onto painting the river.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas. For reference, on the painting/flocking I've mostly been following the tutorial for painting the GW Realm of Battle board in the articles section.

Oh, I almost forgot, to get the edges square, I cut the foam a little over 24" in both dimensions (each tile is 24"). Then I glued the foam squares to the MDF bases with two of the edges perfectly lined up. After that I set an extra MDF base on top of the foam with the same two edges lined up. I did not glue this MDF down. At this point I have foam sandwiched between two pieces of MDF, and the foam is glued to one of the MDF pieces. With this setup, I could run a hot wire cutter down the edge of the MDF and get a perfectly square (or pretty close to square) cut. Make sense?

- Andy

Love it, really cool stuff, man!

Got any more juicy pics for us?

FoxPhoenix135 wrote:Got any more juicy pics for us?

Sure, here you go. I was a annoyed to discover that my hill pieces don't line up quite perfect on top as you can see in the pictures. It looks like Home Depot changed foam thicknesses in the middle of my project. Arghhh!!! Anyway, I'm just living with it for now.

My buddies and I played on it for the first time today. We used this configuration and it worked pretty well. For now I'm going to take a break from terrain for a few weeks to paint guys. After that I'll probably jump into making a couple more tiles. I need to make some flat pieces with no river or anything, and I'd like to make something with a multi-level base of some sort with bridges, towers, etc...

Anyway, let me know what you think.

This is real nice. It takes commitment to execute this kind of project. Wanna share the total cost for this project?

a94marbo wrote:This is real nice. It takes commitment to execute this kind of project. Wanna share the total cost for this project?

These prices are just from memory so they probably aren't exact:

Frame:
- 5 pieces of oak from Home Depot @ $12-15 per piece: $60
- 1 qt. of stain and shellac from Home Depot @ ~$8 per qt: $16
- 1 bottle of wood glue:
- Misc brushes and rags from Home Depot: $10
- Total: ~$86

Board:
- ~3 sheets of foam from Home Depot @ $8-10 per sheet: $40
- 4 sheets of 2x4 MDF from Home Depot @ ~$6 per sheet: $24
- Blue, green, white, and black bottles of paint from Hobby Lobby @ ~$8 per bottle: $32
- 2 jars of Woodland Scenics flock from Hobby Lobby @ ~$17 per jar: $34
- 1 gallon of Elmer's glue from Home Depot @ ~$7: $7
- Misc brushes, rags, plastic sheeting to protect my floor, etc... from Home Depot and Hobby Lobby: $30
Total: ~$167

So, overall not actually that bad. call it somewhere between $250 and $300. Not a lot cheaper than the GW board, but with the major added benefit that now I can make extra gameboard tiles myself for another $20 or so if I want to spend the time. Of course, the prices don't include the first attempt I screwed up, which probably added ~$100 to the cost. It also doesn't include tools. Fortunately for me, my other hobbies include working on a project car and working on my house, so I had most of the tools needed (razors, sawhorses, t-square, table saw, mitre saw, clamps, etc...). If you didn't have the tools and couldn't borrow them, costs would obviously go up dramatically. I also have probably spent 80ish hours on this or so, so you gotta include that too .

- Andy